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The lawyer overseeing an inquiry into gender inequities at N.C.A.A. championship occasions insisted Monday that she would act independently of the school sports activities executives who employed her final month.

The lawyer, Roberta A. Kaplan, has a status for pathbreaking authorized work — she, as an illustration, litigated a seminal case towards a federal regulation that excluded same-sex {couples} in its definition of marriage. But some of ladies’s basketball’s leading figures have voiced misgivings about her appointment by the N.C.A.A., which has spent the previous few weeks responding to a public furor over disparities between its males’s and ladies’s basketball tournaments.

“We have a reputation for calling them as we see them,” Kaplan stated in an interview on Monday, when she described her agency’s inquiry as “completely independent.”

Mark Emmert, the N.C.A.A. president, stated final week that neither he nor the affiliation had any prior historical past with Kaplan or her agency, Kaplan Hecker & Fink. But he has up to now resisted calls, most notably from the Women’s Basketball Coaches Association, for a review led by a fee or a lawyer chosen by somebody outdoors of N.C.A.A. management.

“I’ve got my lawyer in my back pocket, and I know he’s going to do what he needs to do to make me look good,” Dawn Staley, South Carolina’s ladies’s basketball coach, told Emmert during a videoconference last week. “And I’m not saying that is the case, but whoever is paying the piper, more than likely they’re going to give you what you want to hear.”

Emmert replied that he had confidence in Kaplan’s agency, however that he understood that there was “a perceptional issue.” He didn’t announce particular steps to strive to ease these considerations.

In Monday’s interview, Kaplan declined to element her monetary association with the N.C.A.A., however she stated that the affiliation, which has spent tens of hundreds of thousands of {dollars} on attorneys in recent times, had not capped her agency’s charges. She stated the agency is early in its fact-finding stage, and he or she urged present and former athletes and coaches to contact investigators, who she stated would be conducting interviews and city corridor conferences within the coming weeks. She stated some former coaches had already spoken to folks concerned within the review.

“The N.C.A.A. itself admits there clearly was a screw-up,” Kaplan stated. But, she added, she wished to review whether or not the disparities on the basketball tournaments had been “just a symptom of a broader problem, which may not even be intentional.”

“It may,” she stated, “just be decades-old assumptions about how things operate.”

Kaplan stated that she anticipated her inquiry would be successfully performed in two phases: the primary, which has already begun, will concentrate on ladies’s basketball, whereas the second will study different championships in different N.C.A.A.-sanctioned sports activities. She stated that she anticipated the review to conclude by the top of the summer time, however she left open the chance that her inquiry into different sports activities might take longer.

Her findings and proposals are anticipated to be made public.

The N.C.A.A. repeatedly apologized for shortcomings at its ladies’s event in Texas, like a weight room that was evenly stocked compared to exercise services that had been made accessible for the lads’s competitors. But ladies’s basketball officers stated that the troubles of the previous few weeks had been half of a sustained historical past of males’s basketball, which is the N.C.A.A.’s monetary lifeblood, being favored over their sport.



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